If music really is the food of love, it’s no surprise the Semibreve Supper Club is stealing hearts, says Elise Rana Hopper
Blackhall Mill is wild at the edges. A former pit village turned bohemian enclave, where the houses end there’s a row of allotments which give way onto open countryside, the river Derwent flowing fast to the right and Milkwellburn Wood up on the rise.
It’s a glorious spring morning and we’re out with one half of the Semibreve Supper Club team – Pia Castleton, permaculturalist, chef and forager – to see what’s good to eat.
Within minutes she has us hunkering down on the riverbank. To the untrained eye it appears unprepossessing, but she points out three wild greens. They are delicious, distinctive – the mange-tout grassiness of chickweed, the garlic-mustard tang of jack-by-the-hedge, and the parsley-and-carrot-top taste of ground elder, a pot herb brought here by the Romans.
“I’ve always loved foraging – for me it’s just an extension of seasonal food,” she says.
We learn that the pretty leaves of wood sorrel are wonderful with fish, lamb or beetroot, that wild garlic shoots are excellent pickled and served with cheese, and that crystallised gorse flowers are an elegant, if labour-intensive, edible garnish for lemon tart.
“That was a bit of a labour of love,” says Pia. “It was for our Troubadour Songs supperclub. The Brothers Gillespie played their music inspired by the Northumbrian landscape, and that informed the menu.”
This sums up the philosophy of Semibreve, as its other half, award-winning concert pianist Annie Ball, attests when we meet at Jesmond’s Cafe 1901, which is home to Annie’s piano.
Bouncing her baby son Rowan on her knee, she reveals what led her to Semibreve. “I was always more interested in alternatives to the typical classical music route,” she says. “I’d spent 11 years in London, studying music and then organising my own concerts when there was a movement taking classical music out of traditional settings. When I came back here, having built up a good reputation performing, I didn’t want to have to start again, so I thought I’d set up my own thing. When I met Pia I was inspired to see how we could combine food and music.”
Fittingly, they met on an allotment, united by a love of food, music, and the passion to create events beyond the usual realms of either. Semibreve was created to take music out of the concert hall and food out of the restaurant. “Tailoring the music to the food and vice versa, designing a programme around food, poetry, a concept – it’s something different,” says Annie.
Launching in summer 2014 with a debut event that caught the attention of the local fooderati, since then they have laid on a Geordie Christmas banquet in a church, celebrated International Women’s Day, female brewers and the pagan goddess of Spring Ostara at The Feathers Inn beer festival, thrown a gourmet picnic at a restored Victorian train station, kitchen-sat for Anna Hedworth at the Cook House in the Ouseburn valley, and stolen the show at the EAT! Festival with a Great Gatsby-themed soirée at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle.
“The atmosphere is nothing like a restaurant, it’s more like a club,” says Annie. “Normally, the chef is in the kitchen, the musician is on stage and you don’t get a connection. Our diners have to commit to the menu, and we don’t dumb down the music.”
‘Decadent but earthy’ says Pia of their shared vision; by way of example, their Nature’s Prelude event combined intimate performances of music by Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Barber and Saint-Saens, a film inspired by starling murmuration, a communal table decorated with lichen, moss, shells and snowdrops, music books and poetry, and a four-course menu featuring razor clams, wild roe, and a rhubarb and rose fool with organic wine pairings from Vintage Roots.
The bohemian eclecticism of their events reflects the passions of these two, whose other ventures include Annie’s performance and representation of the Classical Revolution (the international movement which takes classical music into unusual spaces) and Pia’s forage-and-cook workshops under the brand Wild Orchard and the bike-trailer food education project, Edible Cycles. They aren’t short on ideas, or a network of talented friends to collaborate with. “Newcastle is so supportive,” says Annie. “You can set something up without the corporate sheen that seems necessary for success in London.”
Corporate is certainly not the vibe back in Blackhall Mill, as we return from our forage to Pia’s kitchen. With a stable door that doubles as a counter for the occasional pop-up takeaways that have locals queuing down the street, this tiny, bright space is crammed with intriguing ingredients, from mugwort tea and dandelion root to air-dried seaweed.
A cloth-bound book of handwritten recipes adds to the sense that this is as much magical apothecary as cookhouse.
“I love celebrating local, seasonal produce and putting people in touch with wild flavours, but the environmental impact of what we eat is very important to me too,” says Pia. “I hope to use food to get people thinking. Reeling them in with fine food and wine; getting them to be permaculturists!”
And with that she is away to plan Semibreve’s next collaboration of dinner and music – the food of love, indeed.
